"At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in." Discuss.

Obviously, it's popular and most of developers put it on their CV (not only web developers). It's hard to find a programmer who says "I don't know JavaScript".

However, JavaScript is difficult to program in *good*. It's got different paradigm of Object Orientation than most (prototype based vs. classes). It has also very little and chaotic standard library (but there are projects that fix that), and finally, the language itself is not that great in terms of design, syntax and consistency.

Don't get me wrong, if you use something like Coffeescript, and have deep knowledge on what is actualy going on, you can write good, complex apps in JavaScript. My feeling is that they chose it because it's easy for newcomers to start developing, which is a mistake, and will be a painful one. You can shoot yourself easily in the foot in JavaScript, and people will.